


All the kinds of alive you can be

by bannanachan



Series: A love with no sting [4]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 18:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bannanachan/pseuds/bannanachan
Summary: She hadn’t realized she was saving his life.





	All the kinds of alive you can be

Sae Niijima drove to Yongen-Jaya with a half-conscious teenage fugitive in the back of her car and thought about the word accomplice. She thought about using it in a sentence, as in: _Your honor, Tora-san isn’t the defendant’s girlfriend, she’s his accomplice. I see no reason for this court to entertain the testimony of a criminal._ As in, _I’ll consider proposing a more lenient sentence. That is, if your client would consider providing us with a list of his accomplices._

As in, _Sae Niijima is an accomplice to the Phantom Thieves._

She also thought about a lot of other things. And then she dropped the teenager off in Yongen-Jaya, and got back in her car, and drove home.

By the time she entered the apartment, Makoto was sitting at the kitchen table, two untouched servings of dinner prepared and sitting at each spot. She stood up when she entered, folding her hands demurely before her. “Sis. You’re home.”

A cursory glance at her younger sister’s face was enough to confirm that she’d been crying. Despite this, her tone was cheerfully neutral. Deliberately so. Either it was obvious, or she was thinking about this too hard.

She thought about her next words very carefully before choosing them. “The apartment isn’t bugged, Makoto.”

It was genuinely frightening to see how quickly her sister’s face shifted from neutral to alert to suspicious. “How do you know?”

“I had it checked last week. I paid for it, to be sure it was done right. It seemed like a reasonable precaution at the time. We should be fine as long as we turn our phones off.”

“Oh.” Makoto’s tone was somewhere between surprised and guarded.

Sae glanced at the food. “Have you had anything to eat? I don’t have much of an appetite tonight, but you can grab a bite before we do this if you want.”

Makoto sighed, closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose in the way that she did when she was annoyed with something. “Honestly, I don’t really have an appetite either.”

Later, Sae would tell Sojiro Sakura and Makoto would tell her friends that they’d had a chat. It was much more palatable to all parties involved than admitting that they’d had a fight. Or admitting further that the only reason that the fight didn’t escalate into a screaming match was the thinness of the apartment walls. There was Sae lying that she wasn’t angry with them for using her, but she was furious that Makoto had spent months secretly endangering her own life. There was Makoto snapping that she couldn’t have told her what was going on even if it had been safe to, because she wasn’t there. As usual, their father was brought up, and as usual, their mother wasn’t, and as usual, Sae had to fight to keep herself from getting angry over that because it wasn’t Makoto’s fault she didn’t remember her. They both cried. The tears weren’t enough to convince either of them to back down.

She didn’t ask Makoto if she understood what would happen to her now that the Phantom Thief was missing, and she was the last person to see him. If her sister had weighed her life against the boy’s, and hers was the one that came up wanting, she knew she had no one to blame but herself.

She didn’t sleep that night, and called in sick to work the following day even though she knew everyone would know what that actually meant - it wasn’t exactly the most private mental breakdown. She spent the morning trying to get her head back on straight until early in the afternoon when a news alert on her phone let her know that the leader of the Phantom Thieves had committed suicide in police custody.

A chill went down her spine. She was dressed and driving to Yongen-Jaya in half an hour.

The sign on the cafe door read _Closed_ , and the door was locked when she tried to open it. She knocked (a little harder than necessary) a few times before it opened, revealing Sojiro Sakura on the other side, cigarette in hand. He stared at her for a few seconds before backing up to let her in.

“Might as well come in. I’m guessing you heard the news?”

She looked around the empty shop as she entered. Every visible surface looked like it had recently been cleaned within an inch of its life. The only sign of mess was the glass dish on the wraparound counter which was overflowing with burned-out cigarette butts. “Is he upstairs?”

Sakura nodded. “Sleeping, last I checked. And not taking visitors. He needs to rest.”

She shook her head. “I won’t wake him. I’m not here to talk to him, I just… need to see him.”

He put out his cigarette, ash from the dish spilling onto the counter. “You get one minute. Leave your stuff down here, and don’t bring your phone.”

She nodded. Sakura took the stairs slowly, like he was trying not to make a sound. Self-conscious, she shifted her weight as far into her toes as she could to minimize the clack of heels on wood.

As jarring as the last 24 hours had been, the sight of the kid lying till in his attic bedroom stopped Sae short. She watched his chest rise and fall, and felt her own breath restart in response. He seemed a little better than he had when she’d dragged him though the door, low bar though that was. A black cat was curled at his feet. It looked up as she entered and hissed at her; she heard Sakura chuckle. She stood there for a few seconds, looking at the souvenirs stacked on the shelves and pasted to the walls. She tried to reconcile the image with the one she had held in her mind of the Phantom Thieves’ leader, and then tried to reconcile them both with the headline still open on her phone until she got dizzy.

She hadn’t realized she was saving his life.

Sakura put a hand on her back. “Let’s go.”

Downstairs, she sat at the counter staring at nothing. Sakura puttered about in the kitchen for a few minutes and delivered a mug of coffee into her hand; she sipped it, and the bitterness brought her thoughts back in order.

“I think I owe you an apology, Sakura-san.”

He laughed. “No shit.”

She didn’t say anything. He took another cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, and she noticed that his hands were shaking.

“Honestly? If it was up to me, I’d never let you around either of my kids again. But we both know that it’s not up to me. And they’re gonna need all the help they can get. So you can consider it accepted. As long as you get that starting now, you’re along for the ride no matter what.”

She thought about Makoto. “If I didn’t understand it before, Sakura-san, I certainly know it now.”

He chuckled. “Call me Sojiro. Or hell. Call me boss.”

Things got a little bit clearer after the meeting the next day, all nine of them (ten if you counted the cat) piled into the cafe to talk strategy. The kid - Akira, she reminded herself, he had a name - was standing on his own by then, and Makoto looked so relieved, and Sae thought that she hadn’t seen her smile that much since before their father died. Akira, still disoriented, had to stop the story every few sentences and ask his friends to repeat themselves, and she was glad because she was just as confused but less willing to admit it. The explanation was ridiculous and impossible, and she didn’t have any choice but to believe it. The best she could do was adjust quickly.

She went back to work. It would have been suspicious not to. She ended any conversations that began with “How are you doing?” abruptly, and after a couple days, people stopped asking. She avoided Goro Akechi like the plague until, less than two weeks before the election, a colleague mentioned that he’d missed their meeting that afternoon. She asked Makoto about it when she got home that night, and she started crying.

Sae filed the missing persons report the next day. It was the best she could do for the kid; she only wished she’d done something sooner. Not that she could have done much, or that he deserved much. But she’d known him, and he’d been eighteen, and he’d died alone in a place where his body would never be found. Knowing how many people he’d killed didn’t make that less sad.

She avoided thinking about her own palace. She filled her schedule to the brim, even more full than it had been before all this, hoping that if she stayed busy, she wouldn’t have time to dwell on it. She cleaned the apartment and talked to Sakura on the phone and went to bed every night exhausted in hopes of a dreamless sleep. She dreamed about it anyway. Akira hadn’t told her many specifics, and considering everything else he’d told her, the omission felt intentional. What had that version of her looked like? What monsters had they encountered there? Had there been a version of Makoto there - and if there wasn’t, was that a good or bad thing? What had her treasure looked like - the real version, not the briefcase they’d planted?

What did it mean that they’d never stolen it?

Four days before the election, Makoto got home from school and saw her sitting at the dining table, staring blankly at the same piece of paper she’d been staring at for five minutes. Without a word, she took out her phone, clicked an icon, set it down in front of Sae, and spoke.

“Sae Niijima. Courthouse. Casino.”

Her phone spoke back. “ _Target not found._ ”

Makoto looked up from the phone at her, and Sae looked right back.

“I checked it the moment I knew he was safe. It’s been gone for weeks.”

Sae stopped short, staring at the screen. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Sae kept staring. “But I don’t - if you didn’t take my treasure, why’s it gone?”

Makoto shrugged. “Having a palace doesn’t make you evil, and not having one doesn’t make you good. It just means that you’re seeing things clearly now.”

Sae stared at the phone for another few seconds, then turned it back to Makoto and laughed. “I suppose I must be.”

The evening after they sent the calling card, she made it all the way to the subway platform before they found her. They took her to an empty office in the judicial building. She played dumb and scared until everyone in the room was tired of it, and then kept doing it. She cried, and at that point she was so frustrated that she barely had to fake it. She pushed her anger down and acted the victim and she didn’t change her story, and eventually, she went home.

Makoto was making tea when she entered the apartment. It looked like she’d probably only been home for a couple of minutes herself. Sae hugged her, and Makoto hugged her back.

When they parted, Sae took a breath, still feeling jittery. “What happens now?”

Makoto smiled. She looked exhausted. “We wait.”

They did. When it didn’t take, Sae was disappointed, but not surprised. She had anticipated, privately, that this was the most likely option, even if the kids did succeed in their mission. She had been working on plan B for weeks now. Though she didn’t anticipate the city turning red and ancient bones popping up out of the ground under commuters’ feet. But nobody was perfect.

When the dust settled, the fact that she’d spent days trying to calculate the best thing to do and only come up with one option didn’t make taking it any easier.

He didn’t argue. She couldn’t decide if she’d have preferred it if he had. But she’d realized by then how smart he was, so she kept her explanation as brief and clear as possible, and chose her words carefully, and he didn’t argue. He went to jail. She - and Makoto - didn’t.

She didn’t see much of the Phantom Thieves for the next couple months. Even her sister. When Makoto wasn’t trying to get Akira free, she was studying for entrance exams and doing student council work. When Sae wasn’t trying to get Akira free, or trying to get Masayoshi Shido prosecuted, she was sleeping - and she didn’t sleep much. Some time around the second week, Sojiro Sakura started coming by the apartment every few days and stocking their fridge with curry just to make sure they both ate.

She had never worked as hard before as she did for those 8 weeks. Which was saying something, but it didn’t feel like before. Before, it had been like she was pouring those long hours into a never-ending hole. Like every one of them was sucking her just a little dryer than before, and with every bit of energy sapped out of her the pressure grew. Like she was growing brittle, and counting the days before she knew she’d snap. But despite the gravity of the situation, she felt - happy. Doing something because she wanted to, instead of because she had to. She was still exhausted. But she remembered, as time went by, why she liked this job in the first place.

She didn’t have a vocabulary to describe how he looked when she came to tell him he was going home. Happy, but not glowing. Tired, but resilient. Akira had a fire in his eyes that never quite went out, or it hadn’t since she met him, and an awful lot had happened since then. It was a look she was getting used to seeing again whenever she looked in the mirror.

After the trial was over, she took a week off. It was an unusual thing to do, in her field, to disappear off the face of the planet for a week the day after you got a world-famous criminal who’d almost become prime minister behind bars. But she needed to think, and the kids needed to be together without her there. So she got on a plane to Okinawa, and when she got a message on her phone that wasn’t from Sakura or Makoto, she ignored it.

She told Makoto first, and she got a hug, but not much more out of it. Her sister knew her well enough that she was sure she’d guessed her decision before she made it. Or maybe she’d just expected as much, and Sae couldn’t help but wonder if she might have been better off this whole time just by holding herself to Makoto’s standards instead of her own. Sakura Sojiro laughed at her and said she wouldn’t last two weeks, which she took as a compliment.

The Phantom Thief paused for a few seconds before responding when she told him, and she was quietly certain that it was for dramatic effect. “Good for you.”

Her first defendant was a man who, Sae was almost certain, was guilty. She did her best with it, and in the end, he got community service and time served and walked away without a felony on his record. She wasn’t in the news for it the day after, or the day after that, and she didn’t make a lot of money for doing it. And when she went to sleep that night, she slept so soundly that she didn’t even drink coffee in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> "Hey Hanna why did you post this fic at the exact same time as another P5 fic" That's because I was halfway through writing that fic when all my feelings about Sae Niijima decided to hold me up in an alley at knifepoint until I wrote them down, so they ended up being finished at around the same time, thanks for noticing. Before you comment, know that I know that this is not exactly how the Japanese legal system works, but I elected to sort of... translate things into the American equivalents because it was easier than trying to explain things in Japanese terms and I figured it would be easier for (most of) my readers to understand as well.
> 
> Title is from "Little Bird" by The Weepies. At this point it is a goal to name most of my Persona fic after lyrics written by that band because most of them so far have been and I, uh, don't know how else to do titles. Thanks to Thanks to [blooper-boy](blooper-boy.tumblr.com) for beta'ing.


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